The received thinking in Hollywood is that science fiction is a risky area of film-making. Nevertheless, studios continue to dip their fingers bravely into the danger zone like poor, doomed Peter Duncan in Flash Gordon. Perhaps it's the success of films such as Avatar, or the eternal popularity of Star Wars and Star Trek, but there seem to be more space-oriented movies around at the moment than there have been since the glory days of the 1970s.

Two teaser trailers hit the internet this week for two very different films, both with a futuristic bent but hailing from as far apart in the sci-fi galaxy as it is possible to travel. Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity, starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock in the tale of two astronauts facing disaster after a spacewalk goes horribly wrong, has been on the radar since at least 2011. Gavin Hood's Ender's Game arrives weighed down with plenty of baggage thanks to the repugnant views of its creator Orson Scott Card, who wrote the original novel. But it nevertheless gives us the chance to see Harrison Ford in a space uniform as well as the opportunity to check on the continuing development of Hugo's excellent Asa Butterfield.

Gravity was supposed to be with us in November last year, but will now arrive in October 2013. The movie has managed to avoid any World War Z-style public meltdown, so there's no way of telling what's taken it so long. From the trailer, one could easily imagine this one morphing – once the initial action has dissipated – into an existential, enigmatic and claustrophobic 70s-style space drama such as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey or Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (the presence of Clooney, who starred in the 2002 Hollywood remake, lends something to that reading). Of course, Cuarón may have a less fanciful disaster movie in mind, but something about the trailer's mesmerising slo-mo depiction of catastrophe in space hints at a cerebral subtext. It reminds one of the wonderful stereoscopic turmoil at sea of Ang Lee's Life of Pi, and it's no surprise to note that the film will be released in 3D. It's also worth noting that this is being officially pitched as a science fiction movie, suggesting that something out of the ordinary lies in wait.

So what happens next to our poor beleaguered space floaters? Production cost a reputed $80m, for which we can presumably expect a little more for our dollar than Clooney and Bullock discussing how much oxygen is left for the rest of the movie. Go on Alfonso, chuck in an alien or two to liven things up.

At least Cuarón, whose diverse back catalogue includes such gems as Y Tu Mamá También and Children of Men, has built up a repository of goodwill from cinemagoers. The same cannot necessarily be said for the makers of Ender's Game, which has been hamstrung by Card's determined anti-gay marriage stance. One might have hoped for a movie that transcended its roots (Card's depiction of the genius brute child warrior Ender has been compared to Adolf Hitler) just as the much-missed Paul Verhoeven's superb Starship Troopers subverted the right-leaning subtexts of Robert Heinlein's source novel in 1997. However, one would probably be disappointed, since Card himself is on board as a hands-on producer.

Ender's Game, which also stars Ben Kingsley, Abigail Breslin and Hailee Steinfeld, does arrive with a screenplay officially attributed to director Hood, rather than one of two versions Card is said to have worked on over the years. For those who have not read it, the original 1985 novel is the story of a young boy plucked from obscurity to be trained in war games aimed at discovering a human commander to fight the extra-terrestrial threat of the insectoid "Buggers". This bright-eyed little murder machine is picked for the elite after killing two other small boys in scraps. The US military has for some time now included the book as suggested reading for its marine corps, which really tells you everything you need to know.

Hood is best known for the Oscar-winning South African film Tsotsi, but rather marked his card with the poorly-received comic book sequel X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009. We can only hope that the movie version of Ender's Game flags up the sinister nature of scary military types recruiting rosy-cheeked cherubs for genocidal space war rather better than the trailer (though I have to admit Kingsley's tattooed Mazer Rackham does look suitably horrid).

Hood had this to say about Wolverine a few years back: "Any movie that is simply about good versus evil … is in my view putting out into the world and certainly into a mass audience and young audience's mind a rather dangerous philosophy, which is that there is good and evil in the simplistic and easily defined way … I think that for the last eight years, we've had that philosophy very much prevalent in the Bush administration that if you're on the side of good, at least as you perceive it, then you can do no evil."

That's the kind of philosophy that surely needs to cut through the film version of Ender's Game if the movie is to avoid descending into really quite repulsive gung-ho territory. Summit Entertainment, the studio that made the Twilight films, is apparently eyeing the movie as the first in yet another teen-oriented sci-fi saga, but it seems rather unusual material to say the least. Perhaps the sequel could see an older Ender caught in a love triangle with a Bugger and one of his fellow pubescent angels of death – though one cannot quite imagine Card agreeing to it.